waffle

It’s in the clang mailing list, so I guess it’s now okay to be less vague about.

IE8 beta 2 just came out.

I’m a critic of IE7 and now IE8′s UI layout, because it steals the worst parts of the new Vista organization, and the Vista organization is just not that good. (Short aside on the Vista organization if you missed it: menus are gone, except when they’re not. If you’re going to uproot things, go all the way because that’s the only way you’ll make it work. Also, many programs are now somehow web pages with flow layouts and links. That’s the closest analogy I can find, but it’s not perfect because it implies that IE should fit hand in glove, and it just doesn’t.)

IE8 has improved substantially in standards support but is still far behind, and the IE team seems to be wasting most of their time on gimmicks. Now, they can’t swap in one of the UI guys to help fix rendering bugs or to start implementing parts of CSS3, but they sure as hell can make standards even more of a priority. Beta 2 has yet to provide any new breakthroughs, which is a bit unnerving since a fair bit of the previous process turned out to be the same old game of providing the solution using their own creations — despite being shot down in the HTML5 working group before!

What Beta 2 does deliver on is security and richness of the UI. When you follow several different trails in parallel by opening links from different tabs, the tabs are color-coded accordingly. When you search or type into the address bar, suggestions and preliminary results appear (not unlike the Awesome Bar). And when you open a new tab, you are provided some starting points in a way that could just as easily be helpful as annoying, but they are a great step.

The stump response to these points of progress is careful acknowledgement and a tirade detailing how Firefox or Opera or your BSD-based toaster running your Lynx fork did this years ago. I will admit to having used extensions to have Firefox color tabs on Windows years ago, but I don’t think this is relevant. This sort of “we were first” dick-waving used to be relevant to two issues: tabs and a reasonable standards-compliance (that one’s still true), because every other competitor had had them for years when Microsoft finally started IE back up with IE7. IE6 was, and still is, literally holding back the web from progress.

Microsoft is adopting these things to the benefit of the user, and to the best of my knowledge they’re the first to ship all three out of the box in any release. Credit where credit is due, and Microsoft deserves a “good on you” for the parts where they do succeed in pleasantly surprising me, even if I wish there were more such parts.

Every fall for the last several years, Apple has called to one of their famous “Special Events”, at which they would unveil their new line of iPods for the holidays. Last year’s event was interesting in that the iPhone had been hailed as the best iPod ever, and absolutely nothing had been said about some sort of iPod also being the best iPod ever. We now know that the iPod touch came out of that, as did the fat video-playing cheap iPod nano, which is by now probably the best selling MP3 player in the world. Ever. Also, the direct descendant of the first iPod got renamed iPod classic, which (the suffix) is never a good thing if you’re an Apple product.

So this year, even less is certain. There are compelling reasons to throw away and keep any single iPod, but at the same time Apple has always tended towards a more clean iPod lineup.

iPod shuffle

Today: 1 GB $49, 2 GB $69, silver, lime green, cyan blue, purple and “PRODUCT (RED)” red.

Keep: Because it’s the simplest and cheapest model; never underestimate the number of iPod owners that also own a shuffle model, or the number of people that would never otherwise own iPods or even MP3 players, but own shuffles.

What to upgrade: 1 GB for $49 isn’t as cost efficient as it once was. You practically find 2 GB USB keys in your cereal these days. A new model with more memory would be the obvious upgrade; the first iPod shuffle had a lot of dead plastic, but you can’t shave away as much now.

Dump: Because (as mentioned above) it’s not a canny purchase from a storage point of view. iPod nanos are creeping down in price, and a 1 GB or 2 GB model at around $99 could replace the shuffle, up the price while bringing more features — features that are hard to strap to the back of the shuffle.

iPod nano

Today: 4 GB $149 (silver only), 8 GB $199, silver, pink, lime green, cyan blue, black and “PRODUCT (RED)” red.

Keep: Because it’s the most successful and smallest full-featured iPod ever, period.

What to upgrade: The screen seems obvious. The nano is so small that it’s a chore to rearrange it and allow for a better product without making it larger somehow. I don’t see any new features except for Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi would beg for Safari, which works best on touch devices, and making the nano big enough that touch would work would probably destroy much of its appeal. FM radio remains a built-in in other brands that’s an accessory away in iPods, but it doesn’t seem like the big splash feature. The storage will probably double or possibly quadruple. I know flash chips are small but they’re not that small, and they’re not that cheap. Don’t bet on anything beyond 32 GB.

Dump: Because a new touch iPod product is coming to take its place, and the extra heft is totally and universally deemed “worth it”. I’m far from convinced that this will happen, but I can’t rule it out. Rest assured that iPod nano is the second-to-last product Apple would ever drop unless they had a much better successor.

iPod classic

Today: 80 GB $249, 160 GB $349, silver and black.

Keep: Because of the high storage capacity.

What to upgrade: If it stays, iPod classic will stay and thus be upgraded for its physical potential for 1.8″ hard drives. In other words, storage, and lots of it. For software, see the iPod nano discussion. I can’t rule out a fat iPod touch, with the iPhone OS and a hard drive.

Dump: Because storage isn’t important anymore. The classic hasn’t got the biggest screen, it’s not the only one that can show video and play games and the moving-parts hard drive is increasingly a liability. Storage and tradition are the only things the iPod classic’s got going for it.

iPod touch

Today: 8 GB $299, 16 GB $299, 32 GB $399.

Keep: Because it’s the single touch iPod so far.

What to upgrade: Storage capacity and extra functionality is no direct match for the iPod nano or iPod classic. There’s no FM radio support through the Radio Remote, there’s no support for the Camera Connector (through which you can dump your camera’s photos onto the iPod), there’s not even Nike+iPod support. Look for a 64 GB model and a hefty software upgrade.

Dump: Because the remaining iPods have been remade with touch interfaces instead; a real long shot.

Beyond iPods, these things are also relevant:

iTunes

Today: 7.7.1 and in some ways a wilted product. Once full of life, it’s lost most of its momentum from its earlier days. Upgrades are mostly used to bring support for new iPod/iPhone or iTunes Store features. There’s been a long time since anything significant hit the music organization vein that’s still the core of the application, and it technically sits on top of an application framework that Apple’s all but moved away from completely.

Expect: A new reinvigorated iTunes 8.

iPhone

Today: 2.0.2 after a shaky iPhone 3G launch.

Expect: A mild update to 2.1, possibly adding some core features we’ve come to expect from cell phones but for some reason haven’t made it into iPhone software just yet, like MMS, basic video recording, sending contacts or photos over Bluetooth. Or why not copy/paste along with the previously announced “Push Notification Service”?

iTunes Store

Today: Recently launched in a bunch of new countries in order to support the iPhone launch and activation against domestic carriers.

Expect: Some music for some of those new stores. Also, possibly a new subscription service (maybe some sort of hybrid model where you can “rent” albums for free for a week or a day until you know if you’d like them) and some Beatles music.

MobileMe

Today: A relaunched .Mac service that’s just finally getting into its regular routine after a disastrous launch with many free apology months, lost mail messages and general availability issues.

Expect: Some humbling, comforting words if anything, and possibly the launch of a new service bound to MobileMe, since that seems to be the way these things go these days.

Come on, everyone. It’s time to stop redoing the same damn mistakes.

• If you’re having a discussion that at least pretends to not be about pragmatism, stop comparing programming languages based on the performance of their current implementation. Twenty years ago, during the great computing darkness, maybe languages weren’t reimplemented, but thirty years ago they were, and nowadays they are as well. Execution performance is a completely irrelevant metric of a programming language. It’s a good metric for programming language runtimes or virtual machines or compilers or JITs. You should like the pen because it fits well in your hand, not because with the industrial-grade 10 liter sidecar, it doesn’t run out of ink.

• If you’re having a discussion about Windows, I forbid you to refer to a BSOD that’s not the NT-XP-Vista-era “seriously fucked up/bad driver” version. We’ve been through this. It’s been eight years since Windows 9x crashed and burned. It’s every bit as relevant as shooting down Mac OS over the Bomb, or pretending you have to recompile the Linux kernel or hack the X config (from what I’ve heard, it’s debatable which is worse) to change keyboard layouts on a modern Linux distribution. It’s 2008. It’s not an argument anymore, it’s a concession of the discussion.

• If you’re aiming to introduce a “new kind of politics”, you might do well to avoid citing a richness threshold number that McCain explicitly quoted as a lark because he thought it was a weird statistic to define. The guy doesn’t remember how many houses he owns! You had an open goal. (This references “soccer”; hardcore americans may substitute their favorite Blernsball parallel.) Yeah, the other side uses the same god damned tactics of cutting out phrases with surgical precision. That’s not a useful excuse. That’s an admission.

What mistake do you think we need to stop doing?